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I’ve arrived!

Where to begin with all my news…Well, I’ve moved house, I suppose that is a good start! I am now a lot closer to my main place of work in the Stratford archives and I absolutely love the people I live with. The house is amazing, so beautiful and welcoming. They are mad about the Arts too, which means lots of singing and acting! I feel incredibly happy and everything is moving forward.

My new home town!

As well as moving house, I have been busy building up the pages for the National Trust website for both the Kinver and Clent sites. A lot more information has been uploaded concerning conservation, volunteer groups, and also new projects. I was lucky enough to interview a poet named Helen Calcutt, the appointed Writer in Residence of the Clent Hills, who has spent three months gathering personal reflections from interviews with visitors. These have been forged into a poem entitled ‘Poem to Clent’. She gave me a copy of the poem and I really loved the flow of words. I shall be uploading the poem to the site in January.

A number of community-based writing projects are set to take place over the coming months, beginning with the Archway Project – where the words and thoughts of local walkers from the ‘Poem to Clent’ edited by Helen Calcutt have been shaped and carved into the body of wood. This is now open for visitors to see!

I really enjoyed interviewing Helen, she was lovely to talk to and what a fantastic career she has as a poet!

As well as working hard on the National Trust website, I have been busy getting involved in more archive work. I have been appointed as a Digitisation Assistant for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and have been getting used to using all sorts of fancy equipment in the Digitisation Studio. I have been scanning in images from the 1982 Shakespeare Theatre production of The Tempest, using Lightroom to import and touch-up the images and make them available for the website.

The costumes for the production were absolutely amazing and I am hopefully going to be involved in the conservation and digitisation of the costumes next year, including the ones from this production! I was also lucky enough to be involved in the digitisation of an object from the collection- a pillow! A mini photoshoot was set up with a camera and professional lighting, which allowed us to take high quality shots to upload to the website. Here is the original page for the item on the website. I can tell you that the new images are far better now!

An older image from the archive of the 1982 production of The Tempest, with Derek Jacobi as Prospero. The new images should be up next year!

The costume!

As well as my new position at the Trust I am still involved in all my other work. I was recently asked to write an article for the West Midlands Career Development Group which is a Special Interest Group of CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. After attending the seminar in Rugby (see my previous post) I was asked to write about the experience which will be published in the magazine for the group next year.

I’m so glad I have arrived in Stratford! I finally feel settled! And this means more blog posts…and also baking, woo hoo, cakes!